The scientists and activists that pushed New York State to ban high-volume hydrofracking are working overtime against a speculative plan to inject CO2 rather than water into Southern Tier shale formations to extract natural gas.
By backing new state legislation to extend the ban to include CO2, they hope to strangle the project in its cradle — if it isn’t already dead.
The health status of the ambitious scheme is now in doubt because its creator, Southern Tier Solutions (STS), has gone silent in the face of mounting practical and technical obstacles.
Last fall STS mailed packages to 6,500 landowners in Broome, Tioga and Chemung counties, inviting them to lease their properties for a nominal fee of $10 and the dangled hope of future income from gas extraction and CO2 storage.
That extra money would begin to flow, STS promised, once it completed an estimated $15-billion plan to combine carbon sequestration with a massive new gas drilling spree.
The company’s website said it envisioned a series of up to a dozen energy hubs in the three counties, each “supported by a 50,000-100,000 acre leasehold position.” Every hub would include a new gas-powered electric generating plant, a direct air capture facility (DAC), equipment to separate CO2 from methane and a network of new CO2 and methane pipelines linking it all.
Bryce Phillips, STS’s spokesman, began holding public meetings for curious landowners in Elmira on Nov. 10. WaterFront attended and was the first news outlet to report on the scheme the following day.
Phillips was free-wheeling and garrulous in several interviews then. He told WaterFront that the company would decide by early March whether to proceed with the drilling of pilot wells. STS would only go forward, he said, if it had signed leases for at least 100,000 acres.
Phillips stopped answering phone calls and emails from WaterFront and other reporters several weeks ago, and he did not respond to questions posed in recent days.
But one inquirer did…
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